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ArtKabinett Files

ArtKabinett is proud to feature articles and information for our community. Articles come from our own members as well as contributors from all parts of the art community. Collector members post comments at the end of each daily entry.

VENICE.- The French pavilion for the Venice Art Biennale 2017 has been transformed by Xavier Veilhan and the pavilion’s curators, Christian Marclay and Lionel Bovier, into a musical space in which professional musicians from all over the world will work throughout the duration of the exhibition.

ANJOU, FRANCE.- Laure de Beauvau-Craon, who led Sotheby’s France for almost 15 years, died on Saturday, 29 April in Anjou, in the Loire valley, aged 74.

Born Laure de Rougemont, she became a princess when she married Marc de Beauveau-Craon, the heir of a noble house tied to the duchy of Lorraine. Her royal title did not stop her from waging—and winning—a war on another ancient order, France’s “commissaires-priseurs”. Established by King Henry II in 1556, the organisation held a monopoly over the auction market in France for centuries.

BRUSSELS.- There are two ways to deck Donald Trump. Ai Weiwei and Shepard Fairey have teamed up with Belgian skateboarding non-profit, The Skateroom—which supports charitable initiatives through the sale of fine art skateboard decks—to create works that take aim at American president Donald Trump.

According to the Skateroom’s website, the artists were given a carte blanche to create whatever they wanted.

The works are marketed prominently on the site’s homepage under the banner “#100daysoftrump.”

MEXICO CITY.- The Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, National Art Museum of Mexico) presents ‘Melancholy’, an exhibition that delves into the manner that melancholy, commonly characterized by reflecting the darkest human sides of passion and affection, is represented in Mexican art through a selection of 137 works of art including paintings, etchings, sculptures and writings.

The exhibits can be visited through April 9th through end of July, in the rooms on the first floor of the site.

VENICE.- Damien Hirst has created the exhibition the post-truth world deserves. “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” showing concurrently at both of the Pinault Foundation’s spaces in Venice, is a labyrinthine, multi-layered concoction bringing together stories, objects, film, and photographs, all of them dubious—deliberately, teasingly so.

MADRID.- What began more than a century ago as one man's passion for all things Spanish, has become the world's largest collection of Hispanic art outside Spain -- and now part of it is going on display in the country for the first time.

Masterpieces from the 18,000-work collection founded by American philanthropist Archer Milton Huntington go on display at Madrid's Prado Museum from Tuesday.

AMSTERDAM.- After an absence of 14 years, the two paintings by Van Gogh that were feared lost are again on display in the Van Gogh Museum. The works were stolen from the collection in 2002 by thieves who needed only a few minutes for the entire operation.

The theft was a major blow to the art world.

Last September, a team from the Italian Guardia di Finanza stumbled upon the two paintings during a house search in the vicinity of Naples.

ST. LOUIS.- Edgar Degas’s depictions of ballet dancers, nude bathers and racetracks have been abundantly—perhaps even overabundantly—shown.

But at the St. Louis Art Museum, “Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade” offers the first in-depth look at an important but less-familiar subset of the famed French Impressionist’s output: paintings and drawings of the hat business.

BEIJING.- Ren Hang, one of the leading lights of the new generation of Chinese photographers, despite enduring censorship and intimidation from the authorities throughout his career, died on Friday at the age of 29, his gallerist has confirmed.

Ren Hang was arrested many times for his sexually explicit, joyously celebratory photography. Although he was globally renowned, he never gained the recognition he deserved in his home country, in part because he was repeatedly denied the opportunity to display his work in Beijing and throughout China.

LONDON.- Among the finest works by Gustav Klimt ever to come to auction, Bauerngarten was painted in 1907, during the golden years of Klimt’s career, and was a highlight of the critically acclaimed Painting the Modern Garden exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year.

This work is to be offered at auction for the first time in over two decades, set to lead Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 1 March 2017.

LONDON.- A US hedge fund chief has refused to sell a Renaissance masterpiece painting to Britain's National Gallery after the Brexit vote sent the pound tumbling.

The iconic London museum had met the £30 million asking price agreed in a 2015 deal with James Tomilson Hill III, chief executive of the Blackstone Alternative Asset Group, for Jacopo Pontormo's "Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap".

But Tomilson Hill now argues that the pound's weakness against the dollar would leave him with a "material loss".

MIAMI, FLA.- The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU has commissioned a new dramatic work based on the museum’s current exhibition, Stitching History from the Holocaust. The new one act play is called A Stitch in Time, and is about the true story of Paul and Hedwig “Hedy” Strnad who tragically perished in the Holocaust after failed attempts in 1939 to secure a visa to flee to the U.S. from Prague.

NEW YORK, NY.- On March 2, 2017, Sotheby’s will offer a single-owner sale dedicated to the collection of Ed Cohen and Victoria Shaw. Titled, In Its Own Light, the auction is largely focused on Post-War and Contemporary Art, including examples of German Expressionism and Modern British art.

The New York couple’s collection was created over 35 years and reflects the close relationships (often grounded in a shared passion for literature), between Ed Cohen and many of the artists represented, as well as with gallerists such as Anthony d’Offay and Marian Goodman.

LONDON.- In a new and unusual approach to color in the work of abstract painter Josef Albers, David Zwirner’s first London exhibition devoted to Albers focuses on one color that held a pervasive place in the artist’s oeuvre.

Sunny Side Up, a trove of paintings in which yellow dominates, is drawn from five decades of the artist’s work and conveys the limitless expressive potential of color and light that characterizes Albers’s practice as a whole.

If there was any single inspirer of Josef Albers’s embrace of color it was the German Romantic poet, Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

PARIS.- The Louvre Museum in Paris has announced that its 2016 visitor figures fell by 15 percent and, subsequently, so have its profits, in what has been a tumultuous year for France.

The museum announced a drop in visitor figures by millions, resulting in a large financial loss for the beloved French museum which was, on top of prior terror attacks in Paris, flooded and caught up in a fire last year.

NEW YORK CITY.- The first of four planned phases of the Second Avenue Subway opened on New Year's Day, marking the first major expansion of the New York City Subway system in 50 years.

In the early part of 2014, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority revealed that it would liven up stations along the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway line with tons of public art. On Sunday, visitors viewed the first of many planned installations.

LONDON.- Recognized as leading dealers in the field of European sculpture, Tomasso Brothers Fine Art also specializes in Old Master paintings and objets d’art.

At TEFAF Maastricht 2017 the gallery will present an extremely rare portrait from the late 16th century by the renowned Italian Baroque artist Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), and for which a full provenance, including King Philip V of Spain and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, can now been unveiled following extensive research by the gallery.

LONDON.- Exploring an unparalleled period in American art, this long-awaited exhibition reveals the full breadth of a movement that will forever be associated with the boundless creative energy of 1950s New York.

In the “age of anxiety” surrounding the Second World War and the years of free jazz and Beat poetry, artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted conventions to unleash a new confidence in painting.

MUNICH.- A German court Thursday threw out a challenge to the will of collector Cornelius Gurlitt, clearing the way for a spectacular Nazi-era art hoard found in his home to go to a Swiss museum.

The superior regional court in the southern city of Munich ruled that collection, including pieces by Cezanne, Beckmann, Holbein, Delacroix and Munch, could be inherited by the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern.

Gurlitt died in May 2014 aged 81 and named the museum as the sole heir of the hundreds of works, found in his cluttered Munich apartment and valued at millions of euros.

NEW YORK, NY.- Park Avenue Armory mounts the North American premiere of Manifesto —a work by Julian Rosefeldt that stars Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett.

Inspired by the tradition of artist manifestos, Manifesto is a collage of artistic declarations of the 20th century reinterpreted as poetic monologues that provoke timeless questions about the artist’s role in society.

Rosefeldt adapts the installation in a site-specific presentation for the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, where it is on view December 7, 2016 – January 8, 2017.

NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art presents A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, an exhibition that brings together 260 works from MoMA’s collection, tracing the arc of a period of artistic innovation between 1912 and 1935.

MIAMI, FLA.- The Rubell Family Collection announces a planned move in 2018 to a new 100,000-square-foot museum set on a 2.5-acre campus in Miami’s Allapattah District. The planned move comes after 23 successful years in the RFC’s current, legendary 40,000-square-foot museum space in Miami’s Wynwood District. The new museum is designed by Selldorf Architects and is slated to open December 2018.

The Rubell Family Collection’s move is motivated by the desire to exhibit a greater proportion of the collection and expand the Collection's programming.

LONDON.- Alexander Rodchenko’s Construction No.95, is the star of a single owner collection of Russian avant-garde works set to come to auction for the first time in November.

Dating from 1919, when Russia led the world in terms of artistic innovation, this is undoubtedly the most important work by the artist to appear at auction since Sotheby’s landmark sale of Russian Avant-Garde and Soviet Contemporary Art in Moscow in 1988.

PARIS.- On December 13th, Artcurial’s photography department will gather collectors from around the world for a rare event, an auction with a remarkable origin: The Stéphane Kovalsky Collection, featuring the Willy Ronis inheritance.

This is the first monographic auction dedicated to the great humanist artist, Willy Ronis and will include around 160 lots, mixing famous works and lesser-known pieces, retracing the impressive career of the photograph whose comrades included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Edouard Boubat.